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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Life After Acceptance

My first experience with the wonderful created world of Glenda was book two (Stormlord Rising) of her Stormlords Trilogy. I loved it. Rich believable world, strong, but flawed, characters, and a wonderful story. The plot is multi-layered yet she effortlessly weaves all the pieces together in a real page turner. A very satisfying read and one I couldn't put down until the denouement.

I enjoyed it so much I wrote to her and asked her if she'd be a guest on Over Coffee. I'm honored she accepted.Glenda is a fascinating woman. Why? She’s the wife of a Malaysian scientist with a job with the UN, raised two children while traveling the world. Glenda has in lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Borneo, Tunisia in North Africa, and Vienna, Austria. She’s worked about every job you can imagine and probably some you can’t. She’s a passionate defender of the rainforest and a field ornithologist. She tells us:

“[While in South-East Asia ] I learned to tie a sarong, cook with chillies, speak the language, clean squid, make curry, eat politely with the fingers of one hand, get rid of cobras in the house and explore the rainforest…

We returned to Malaysia where I turned more and more to environmental work, earning a living as a field ornithologist. I've waded through mangrove swamps, been followed by a tiger and attacked by a king cobra, been caught in a flash-flood and stung by a colony of irate wasps, studied birds on tropical atolls and swum with turtles. I've survived an open boat in a tropical thunderstorm and been eaten alive by leeches, mosquitoes, sandflies, ticks, chiggers and things that don't even have names. Would I do it all again? You betcha! In fact, I still do. My love of the rainforest is boundless, and I feel obligated to do my best to save it…

[Through all this] I kept on writing—in tents, at home, on boats and beaches, in swamps and mangroves, in national parks and logging camps, in airports and on planes.”

Boy, am I glad she kept on writing! Glenda shares what it's like as author after being published.

The day I heard my first book had been accepted for publication was also the day before my mother’s funeral. I was standing in my sister’s house after flying in from overseas, ripped by grief and feeling guilty because I hadn’t been there, when I was handed a fax. It was from my agent. I read it several times before the words even began to make sense. After almost seven years of various story rejections, there it was: Havenstar was to be published, chosen as one of three launch novels for a publisher’s new fantasy and science fiction imprint.

I was torn in two. The moment I had waited so long for, worked so hard to achieve – it had finally arrived. I wanted to be ecstatic, yet I was swamped with despair. I wanted to scream and dance for joy, yet I was weeping inside. My mother would have been delighted for me, but she died not knowing that her youngest daughter was achieving her lifelong dream. She would never know. I was devastated, conflicting emotions churning inside. Even now, thirteen years later, I can feel the raw anguish of that moment, the sense of Oh, why didn’t I know this a few days ago while she was alive?

Most authors – fortunately – don’t experience quite that mix of pain and joy when they get the news. They think they’ve reached the mountain peak where the view is great, and from now on everything will be wonderful … What they don’t know in that perfect moment of joy is that all they are doing is standing on a bump along a very long road.

They’ve probably spent years perfecting that first book. It’s their baby. They’ve thrown out a number of other attempts, but not this special one. This one they’ve nurtured, rewritten, polished. They’ve had it critiqued, it’s been rejected numerous times by publishers and agents - but still they’ve maintained their faith in it. And now that faith is vindicated.

Imagine it: standing there on the pinnacle of your career as a writer. You envision a lovely new book with your name on a shiny cover, loads of money, bookshops asking you to come and do a signing, fanmail stuffing up your inbox…What you get instead is a contract you don’t understand and a request for a rewrite from an editor you’ve never met – help, she even wants to change your baby’s name. Worse, she doesn’t like your name, either! She wants a pseudonym.

If you haven’t got an agent, you scurry around trying to find one because everyone says you ought to have one before you sign a contract. And that contract: horrors, it talks about your NEXT book as well. The one you haven’t started yet. And what does “at a discount of 52.5% up to 57.5% inclusive the royalty payable will be four-fifths of the prevailing rate…” actually mean? You’re not a lawyer! And where’s the bit about the date of publication? Oh, that’s on page twelve…Nooo - you have to wait anything up to two years? Two years? Your family’s already planning the launch party!

About then you realise this pinnacle of your career is really more like a road hump and you still have to negotiate the potholes of contracts and re-writes and copyedits and proofing and back page blurbs. Not to mention starting a website, and blogging and all those other things that authors are supposed to do. Publication day may well be ages in the future, but somehow everything has to be done in a hurry. Worse, you not only have to write a new book, but you’ve made a crazy promise to hand it in within twelve months - even though the first one took you six years to complete.

You want to drop your daytime job, but you can’t do that. Your advance is hardly enough to buy the cat food; it’s certainly not going to pay the mortgage. Everyone agrees: stopping work is madness for a new writer. So somehow you learn to juggle job, kids, spouse, leisure, getting the flu and carpel tunnel syndrome – while writing to a deadline. And suddenly the bump on the road begins to look more like an abyss.

Never fear, though. One day, in the mail, there comes a book. You rip open the packaging, and there it is: your creation. It has your name (or pseudonym) on the cover. There’s your dedication to your long-suffering family. Those are your words there in chapter one, your story, your blood, sweat and tears, paragraph after paragraph. (Probably a typo or too as well, so don’t too look closely right now.)

And that’s the mountain top. You’ve arrived. Some time soon you’ll have to deal with the deadline again and all that other stuff, but right now you really are standing on the peak, smelling that new book smell, and the view is magnificent.

Better still, sometime very soon, someone, somewhere, is going to ask you, “So where do you get your ideas?”

Stormlord Rising

Shale Flint has skills needed in a world in which water is worth more than gold, yet he can't control his own destiny. Circumstances force him to continue helping the devious rainlord, Taquar Sardonyx, to create rain—even though Taquar is using his control of water to further his own lust for power…Terelle has been forced to leave the Scarpen with her great-grandfather, Russet; his painting of her future has trapped her into doing his will. Russet will not give up until he has regained his status as a Watergiver lord in his homeland—but Terelle is determined to resist, no matter what the price.Meanwhile, Ryka Feldspar has been captured and taken as a concubine by a Reduner tribemaster. She discovers her rainlord husband, Kaneth, in the slave lines, but he has no memories of their time together. She is desperate to flee—but how can she leave him to his fate? Excerpt

As I said, I read book two first, but there were things I had to guess at--not hard, but a lot to absorb. So I would highly suggest reading Book One: The Last Stormlord, Synopsis and the excerpt, first.

BOOK GIVEAWAY Glad to do this, and the book will come from me, posted to anywhere. Choice of The Last Stormlord or Stormlord Rising.

~ * ~ * ~

Glenda was born on a farm in Western Australia, and moved to Malaysia after her marriage. She has been at various times in her life a housemaid, a high school teacher, a university tutor, a field ornithologist and a designer of nature interpretive centres. Besides Australia, she has lived in Kuala Lumpur and Malaysian Borneo, Tunisia in north Africa and Vienna, Austria. Her passion (when she is not writing) is rainforest conservation. Sometimes the two things get mixed up and she has been known to do copyedits in logging camps, or to read proof pages by candlelight in a tent in a peat swamp. Aged eight, she decided she was going to be a writer, but her first forays into print were all in non-fiction. When she was forty-five she submitted her first novel to an agent and she now has nine books published worldwide, with the third book of the Stormlord trilogy due out next year.

Stormlord's Exile will be out sometime next year. My publishers haven't put a definitive date on it yet, but it will be by August at the latest in all three countries. They all already have the manuscript, the editors' input has been attended to, and I am now waiting the copyedit...

Made sense ot me, Katy! I saw Glenda's environmental concerns in Stormlord Rising as well as clear way of presenting various environments of her world and animal adaptations that fit them. Even though she doesn't preach, you get an understanding of how the world came to this state and especially the concept behind Random Rain. I certainly didn't see a rainforest in this book although I do wonder about the other land across the Giving Sea...

Hi Katy! Yes, I think a lot of my life spills over into my books. (Where it often gets twisted in wild and wonderful ways...) I haven't done much with tropical rainforest, I must admit, but I did put mangroves into "Gilfeather" and I have included bits and pieces of what happens when you ignore environmental concerns.Actually the pedes in the Stormlord books were inspired by rainforest millipedes!

I always thought of the Isles of Glory as being on the edge of the tropics.

To expand on that answer - I do try not to preach, difficult when I am passionate about the environment! As a writer, I think I am still trying to get right the balance between the story and the things I care about. If the passion intrudes in the sense that it wrenches the reader out of the tale and the world, then I have failed. It's all about that story and those characters, after all, not me.

Hi Sarah. First answer: Kelwyn Gilfeather. I adored him...really, really didn't want to end the Isles of Glory because of him! He is just such a genuinely nice guy, a physician who really doesn't want to hurt anyone, and ends up in the worst possible predicament a man like him could have. I felt sooooooo mean.

Of the female characters, I think my all time favourite has to be Ryka Feldspar. She's short-sighted like me, for a start! Stormlord Rising is her book, although the other characters are there too. When I was writing Stormlord's Exile, the story dictated that she doesn't have quite as much page time, and I kept wanting to go back to her.

Second answer: I don't think I'm famous enough (yet? :-)) to have the publisher send me off on a book tour... I will be in Glasgow for Christmas though. And probably in my home town of Perth, Australia for the National Convention in April next year. After that, who knows? Where are you based?

Actually, I think it's that particular question that divides writers from non-writers -- because writers rarely have a problem with ideas. We have a peculiar kind of brain that is always asking: "What if...?"

I see a tidal bore on a river and I think, 'What if that was used by unpowered boats/canoes/boards to travel the river?'

I see bird stacks (rocky islets with steep cliffs, inhabited only by birds) in a rough ocean off the coast of Scotland, and I think 'What would happen if one fell over and hit the next one -- and there was a person on top?'

I hear a sand dune sing when the sands shift, and I think, 'What if people thought it was speaking?'

What if it stopped raining? What if you lived on a sand dune that moved? What if maps moved to reflect what was happening on the ground? (Hey, J.K.Rowling pinched that one off me!*) These are all ideas I've used. In other words, I get ideas all the time - from life, from my travels, from the news, from TV, from someone making an offhand remark.

Ideas are easy if you have the right kind of weird wiring in your brain. It's the writing it all down that's difficult! ________________________*I'm joking. We both used the idea without being aware of what the other was doing...

Hi Glenda, all interesting reading today, but then I am a devoted fan anyway. I am actually looking forward to your next novel set in the Havenstar world (of course I am looking forward to Exile too) have you even started that one yet?

I said I'd like your job, but what you have written here has put me right off. Love the pix not the way you get them.

Thanks, Angela! (BTW, I will be flying into Glasgow, but maybe we could meet for coffee sometime.)

Jo - the rainforest does have a downside at times...

The new book has indeed been started. It has a working title which will probably change: Haven Break. It is set a few hundred years before Havenstar, in a neighbouring country which is being eaten away by ley... I have written 2 chapters so far.

Hi Zen. I think living in different countries has been an enormous help. I understand how a culture works, and how subtle differences can be - not to mention how easy it is to upset someone without meaning to.

People say I am good at worldbuilding. All my books have been set in made-up worlds...and it is living within another culture, speaking another language, eating different food, among people of another religion, which has helped me understand how to make a brand new world and culture believable. It's the little things that count.

My in-laws are all Muslims (not one of them a terrorist! In fact they are a really unaggressive, kindly bunch...) For most of my married life I have had members of my husband's family living with me on and off. When my kids were young I had a maid from a Javanese family as well. We've all had more laughter than upsets over our misunderstandings. It has made me very sharp-eyed, I think - noticing how other people feel, when they are uneasy or amazed or bewildered because of something I say or do. And that is all excellent training for a writer.

Stormlord's Exile coming out about August 2011 will make the perfect birthday present to myself..... I will be celebrating a birthday with the numbers 0 and 5 in.... It will make a brilliant present!!!

Glenda, I've always loved reading about and experiencing different cultures. I haven't traveled even half as much as you, but what I have seen has left a deep respect for other cultures. I learned early on that different doesn't mean wrong or bad. Taught me a lot about accepting people as they are and from the context of world they're from. Not only tolerance but respect for differences.

Glenda, love the adventures, but you can keep the cobras. Eeewww! I grew up on a tiny island with no snakes (thank you inappropriately introduced mongooses) and they still kind of creep me out. Now that I think about it, I'm not too sure about the tiger stalking either...or the leeches.

You may have trouble getting some of my books. Havenstar is out of print, although I am negotiating with a publisher to get it reprinted. If that doesn't work, I will put it online as a print on demand and an ebook.

The Mirage Makers trilogy was only published in UK and Australia. And the Isles of Glory is OOP in the USA, although you can get it in Australia still. And probably you can find secondhand copies in the US.

Re cultures - as you say, different doesn't mean wrong or even "not as good as ours". However, the hardest cultural differences to accept are the ones we believe are damaging to either the psyche or the body. For example, taking traditional cures instead of Western medicines (I've seen too many people die that way). Or cultural mores that limit the freedoms of women, and browbeat them into thinking that is right, no matter how unhappy they are. Fortunately the latter doesn't happen too much here - Malaysian women tend to be strong-minded. Nowadays some 60 to 70% of university students here are women!

Hi, Glenda, it's wonderful to "meet" you! What a fascinating life you lead! I'm in the southern US, and I will never again complain about the huge cockroaches and sneaky geckos after reading about your encounters with cobras and leeches! Yikes! The books sound wonderful, and I've just added you to my ""must read" list!

I'm with you on that aspect, Glenda. I'm not fond of the subjugation of anyone and being a woman, it would tick me off. We have many freedoms here in the states that aren't available in other areas of the world. One of the things I had to learn is when to keep my mouth shut--not easy at times, lol!

Oo, yes, Sia. I really have to bite my tongue sometimes. And tone down my blog! My husband is fortunately a very calming person...

Hi, Kat. Oh, you've mentioned the one thing I have a horror of: cockroaches. Give me a snake or half a dozen spiders, I'm fine - but cockroaches? I'll run screaming. On one memorable occasion, in the shower of the staff quarters at the ranger station in a national park, I turned on the shower and...you don't really want to know. Let's just say that six of the creatures, fully two inches long, climbed up out of the grating in the shower recess. And I didn't have any clothes on. Nuff said.

I lived in North Carolina for 12 years and regularly go back. They euphemistically call them Palmetto bugs there. My parents lived in Malta for a while and nobody admitted to having cockroaches in their homes. My parents lived on a boat for many years and you could get very, I do mean very, large roaches from the keys and docks. Yuk. Not only that, the cat liked to bring them on board and then play with them with the result she lost a few who found convenient holes in which to hide.

BTW, tell your friend Kat if she gets rid of her palm trees and mulch - she'll get rid of most of her Palmetto bugs...I use lava rock instead of mulch around trees and house, and find other plants where the palms once stood.

It's been nice to read here several positive comments about the covers of the Stormlord books. Covers are incredibly important as they are what entices the reader to pick up the book in the first place. And yet, no one really understands what makes one cover work and another fail.

And did you know that booksellers can have a huge impact on choice of the cover? Let's say a publisher takes a book along to a big book chain and the buyer for the chain looks at it and says - "Oh, with a cover like that, I'll never be able to sell many copies. I'll order 200." The publisher, expecting, say, an order of 5,000, will go back and change the cover.

I agree with your thoughts on the impact booksellers have. They're the ones in the trenches, so to speak.

I'll be honest, it was the cover of Stormlord Rising the caught my eye on the shelf. I hadn't read you before and I wanted to read something new. I read the back and went huh, sounds good and I took it home.

Yes, booksellers are our portal to the world - and I love it when I see how some of them promote their favourite reads. And get disappointed when I talk to others working in bookshops who appear not to read at all, or even like books...

I can't say I had anything whatsoever to do with the cover of these books, but I do bless the artist and the designer!

Morning Glenda, I'm off to bed soon. However, I just wanted to add, for those of you who don't know Glenda's work, I have read everything she has had published and am a very big fan of all of her books. I do prefer the Aussie covers, especially the one for Stormlord Rising, but the one shown here is pretty dramatic. I am at the stage I pick Glenda's books by name of author, not covers of course. I am also a proud possessor of her first book, Havenstar and I do hope Glenda, that you will be able to persuade someone to re-publish as I love it.

Glenda, I've noticed that publisher or their publicity reps send Arcs of books to booksellers. If they love your work they will talk them up. Doesn't hurt authors, especially new ones, to offer a copy to the bookstores in their area for that very reason.

I have several friends who have offered their books to the book buyers of the store and it's amazing to what lengths the store will go to to highlight books they do enjoy with displays and such. One friend had a tower of her books made because the buyer loved her writing.

Living In Malaysia, I am at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to visiting bookstores in Australi, US and UK, or getting to know the booksellers. I do have to rely on my publishers a lot and they are the ones who usually choose who to send arcs to...

I am trying to attend as many conventions as I can, though. (I adore them!)

Palmetto bugs - might sound nicer in name but their just as fright worthy as any cockroach! And they're BIG here...just like in Japan! BIG! Did I say REALLY BIG. I hate them! No, you'd still freak out on seeing them. A roach by any other name is still a roach! ;-)

Hugs - and I will be buying this book!

Sia...I'm sorry I didn't mean to be talking about you...but I had to tell Glenda just how much we all love you...xoxoxo

Believe me, Glenda, it was my pleasure to have you here. We had quite a few pop in and chat and that's always good and fun.

I'll be checking your blog for all the pictures and news from your travels in the rainforest. Do watch out for falling limbs, we need your brain functioning to entertain us with your wonderful stories!

Well you know how it is, Hilary - one always leaves out the boring bits! Mostly writing is sitting at a computer. Most of my rainforest adventures have been accompanied by hours of boring report writing afterwards... :)